[continued from previous message]

In what would be his first and last major interview, Carlos told Time that he was born to a well-known family in São Paulo, Brazil, on Christmas Day, 1935. At the time of his birth, he said, his father, who would later become a professor of literature,
was 17. His mother was 15. He was raised by his maternal grandparents on a chicken farm until he was six, at which point his parents took custody. The happy reunion was cut short, however, when his mother died. The doctor’s diagnosis, Carlos told Time,
was pneumonia, but he believed the cause had been acedia, a condition of numbed
inertia. “She was morose, very beautiful and dissatisfied; an ornament,” he
told Time. “My despair was that I wanted to make her something else, but how could she
listen to me? I was only six.”

Carlos was left to be raised by his father, a shadowy figure whom he mentions in the books with a mixture of fondness, pity and contempt. His father’s weakness of will, he told Time, was the obverse to the “impeccability” of Don Juan. In the books,
Carlos describes his father’s efforts to become a writer as a farce of indecision. He told Time: “I am my father. Before I met Don Juan I would spend years sharpening my pencils and then getting a headache every time I sat down to write. Don Juan
taught me that that’s stupid. If you want to do something, do it impeccably, and that’s all that matters.”

Carlos was educated, he told Time, at a “very proper” boarding school in Buenos Aires, where he acquired the Spanish (he already spoke Italian and Portuguese) in which he would later interview Don Juan. At 15, he said, he became so unmanageable that
an uncle, the family patriarch — Carlos told people he was Oswaldo Aranha, a legendary gaucho and revolutionary who would later become president of Brazil — had him placed with a foster family in Los Angeles. The year was 1951. He enrolled in
Hollywood High School. Graduating two years later, he went overseas to study sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, only to discover that “I did not have the sensitivity or the openness to be a great artist.” Dispirited, he returned to Los
Angeles and enrolled at UCLA. “I really threw my life out the window. I said to myself: if it’s going to work, it must be new,” he told Time of his resolve to take up anthropology. In 1959, he told the magazine, he changed his name to Castaneda.

“Thus Castaneda’s own biography,” concluded Time, “creates an elegant consistency — the spirited young man moving from his academic background in an exhausted, provincial European culture toward revitalization by the shaman; the gesture of
abandoning the past to disentangle himself from crippling memories. Unfortunately, it is largely untrue.”

In short order, the reporter for Time came up with a radically different account of Carlos’s early life, a story later confirmed and appended by Castaneda scholar Richard DeMille, the adopted son of movie mogul Cecil B. DeMille, who has made a life’s
work of studying Carlos.

According to U.S. immigration records, Carlos César Salvador Arana Castaneda entered the U.S. at San Francisco in 1951, at the age of 26. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1959. He was born in Peru, in the ancient Inca town
of Cajamarca, where
witches and curanderos were not at all uncommon in the town marketplace. Carlos
was the son of a watchmaker and goldsmith named César Arana Burungary, who owned a jewelry shop in the downtown section of the city and was himself the son of an Italian
immigrant. Once a promising student, his father was known during his youth as a
Bohemian who squandered his academic opportunities after falling in with a fast
crowd of artists and bullfighters in the capital city of Lima. Settling down at
last to family
life as an artisan and shopkeeper, he was a tireless chess player, a constant reader of Kant and Spinoza. His mother was a slender, almond-eyed girl of 16 named Susana Castaneda Novoa. She died when Carlos was 24. He refused to attend
the funeral,
according to a cousin, and locked himself in his room for three days without eating. When he emerged from his mourning, he declared his intention to go to America.

In his youth, Carlos was an altar boy, attended the local public school. He often went with his father to the jewelry shop; over time he became skilled in working with copper and gold, but he hated selling the things he made. After dropping out of school
in Cajamarca, Carlos moved to Lima, where he finished high school and then enrolled in Bellas Artes, Peru’s national academy of fine arts. A former roommate remembers Carlos as “a big liar and a real friend,” a witty fellow
who loved carousing but
never drank or smoked, who made a living playing cards, horses and dice while harboring “like an obsession” to go to the United States and become rich from gambling. A former classmate recalled Carlos as “a very capable fellow, likable and rather
mysterious. A first class seducer. I remember the girls used to spend the morning waiting around for him at the Bellas Artes. We called him The Smile of Gold because he had, I think, a gold tooth. Sometimes he would go to the market
with some used
watches which he could only make run for two or three hours. He would sell the watches and then disappear…. He was always thinking up unlikely stories — tremendous, beautiful things. At times he sold blankets and ponchos from the mountains.”

Confronted by the reporter from Time, Carlos was characteristically unfazed: “To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics is like using science to validate sorcery,” he said. “It robs the world of its magic.”

[Yes, it does, and that's because there is no magic.]

More alarming, perhaps, than the murkiness of Carlos’s history, was the debate that raged over the academic veracity of his work. Billed as ethnography, it read like a novel and sold like a best-seller—the envy, no doubt, of many a scholar who had
worked in the trenches of anthropology for a lifetime. Though the panel of professors at UCLA who awarded his doctorate continued to stand firmly behind him — in an introduction to The Teachings, one of them lauds Carlos for “his patience, his
courage, and his perspicacity” — social scientists were skeptical, labeling
the work a fictionalized composite in the guise of anthropology, a dramatic rehash that borrowed heavily from the work of others at the expense of accuracy
and truth, not to
mention credit.

In his two volumes on Carlos, DeMille collected ample evidence of what he considered a fraud. Citing myriad examples large and small, he made a case that
Carlos’s books were nothing more than cleverly conceived and masterfully executed works of fiction.
Among hundreds of well-researched nits, DeMille pointed to the facts that, over his years of apprenticeship to the old Indian, Carlos never learned the Indian names for any of the plants or animals he comes into contact with, and neither did Carlos ever
submit a specimen of Don Juan’s mushrooms for chemical testing. DeMille quoted experts — Wasson among them — who said that hallucinogenic mushrooms
do not, in fact, grow in the Sonoran desert, and that the practice of smoking mushroom powder was
unknown prior to Carlos’s books. According to Wasson, the godfather of such studies, mushrooms are more usually eaten or brewed into tea, and even when allowed to dry, they normally macerate into shreds, rather than into a powder. In any case, he said
the leavings do not burn.

Though much of the story takes place in the desert, an expert on climatology -
writing in DeMille’s second book, a collection of essays and interviews debunking Carlos’s work—said that desert conditions, during the times of year Carlos describes, would have been harsh and impassable. In one of Carlos’s entries, for example,
dated in August, Carlos writes of hiking to the top of a hill at noon-time “to rest in the open unshaded area until dusk.” In another entry, dated in June, he describes the evening wind as being “cold.” Summer temperatures in
the Sonoran desert
are typically as high as 120 degrees by noon. At night, they hover around 100.

Moreover, throughout their extensive desert travels, Carlos and Don Juan went unmolested by the kind of pests and predators — scorpions, rattlesnakes, swarming saguaro fruit flies, razor-toothed desert javelinas—that normally torment hikers. He never
mentions some of the more colorful inhabitants of the desert—nine-inch centipedes, tarantulas as big as saucers, gila monsters, chuckawallas and horned toads. During his adventures, Carlos writes of climbing high trees. Yet the trees in the desert—
palo verde, ironwood, mesquite—are nearly impossible to climb, and neither are they high. Their branches tangle into thorny thickets. Higher than six feet
they are too weak to climb. Carlos catches five quails at once in a hastily assembled trap. He
runs down a jackrabbit and snares it with his bare hands. He hurdles breakneck and terrified through the desert, through barrel cacti and prickly pears and thorny scrub bushes, but never once does he mention being stabbed or cut by thorns. And while he
wrote in his books that he took notes on everything — his note-taking, in fact, becomes an object of derision by Don Juan and his associates — Carlos never produced any field notes.

A close reading of Carlos’s books, said DeMille and his collected experts, revealed Don Juan’s teachings to be an amalgamation of American Indian folklore, oriental mysticism, and European philosophy — drawing on, among others, Huxley and Puharich,
Slotkin and Wasson, Goddard and Yogi Ramacharaka, a pseudonymous American whose
works are still widely available in occult bookstores.

Of equal concern was the existence of Don Juan himself. According to Carlos, the old Nagual was born in 1891, watched his parents murdered by soldiers, suffered through the government-forced diaspora of the Yaquis all over Mexico during that era. DeMille
and his experts point out that while many Indian tribes, such as the Huichols, use peyote rituals, the Yaquis, as a rule, did not. Yaqui sorcerers, they continued, don’t take apprentices, either. It didn’t help matters that not one known expert on
the desert culture of the Southwest had ever heard anything about Don Juan and his party. Or that exhaustive attempts to locate the wily old Indian were unsuccessful. In Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties, anthropologist
Jay Courtney Fikes posits that Don Juan was a composite of a number of different shamans who’d been discovered, variously, by Wasson and by several of Carlos’s colleagues in the anthropology department at UCLA. Indeed: why else would a field
researcher spend so much time in UCLA’s graduate research library?

“Although Castaneda’s concocted episodes often have something authentic about them, they trivialize Huichol, Yaqui or any Native American culture …” writes Fikes. “Those few kernels of truth Castaneda’s books contain are dissolved inside a
concoction full of spurious ingredients. Finding ethnographic truth in Castaneda’s books is almost as laborious as panning for gold.”

Even while debunking him, however, DeMille exhibited a fondness and a overarching respect for Carlos and his work. The continuing saga might have been the product of Carlos’s mind — but what a marvelous saga it was, what a valuable mind:

“Castaneda wasn’t a common con man, he lied to bring us the truth,” DeMille wrote in his first book, Castaneda’s Journey. “His stories are packed with truth, though they are not true stories, which he said they are. This is not your familiar
literary allegorist painlessly instructing his readers in philosophy. Nor is it
your fearless trustworthy ethnographer returned full of anecdotes from the forests of Ecuador. This is a sham-man bearing gifts, an ambiguous spellbinder dealing
simultaneously in contrary commodities — wisdom and deception.”

After the meeting in the student union, it would be four years before Gloria Garvin actually saw Carlos again face to face. Meanwhile, she read all his books, followed all the publicity, participated in the gossip that was rampant in the anthro
department at UCLA. Part of the gossip centered around Carlos’s very earthly reputation as a Lothario. Some even questioned whether he ever went to the desert at all — his wanderings, they said, were just a ruse to cover his bed hopping. Besides the
library worker — who, he would later claim, was energetically damaged during her own studies with Don Juan and would live with him in the Pandora compound for many years — Carlos was also involved with two women in the department, Regine Thal and Ann
Marie Carter, who would later change their names to Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar. He also began seeing a married mother of two named Judy Guilford, who would later call herself Beverly Ames, and then eventually Carol Tiggs.

[Sager has this wrong. Beverly Ames was not Carol Tiggs.
Carol Tiggs was Kathleen Adair Pohlman, later Elizabeth Austin,
and also Muni Alexander.]

Tiggs would become especially famous in Castaneda circles as a powerful sorceress who crossed over into the Second Attention for ten years and then returned to help guide Carlos and the others in his inner circle. Together, Tiggs, Donner-Grau and Abelar
would form the triumvirate of Witches who surrounded Carlos for the duration of
his life. All three would write books about their own, separate apprenticeships
with Don Juan.

[Also incorrect. Only two of them wrote books. Tiggs didn't.]

Gloria talked to Carlos now and then by phone, exchanged the occasional letter,
but never saw him in person until one day, walking across campus during the winter quarter of 1973, she spotted him. Their eyes locked, he came over. He acted as if they’d
met only yesterday.

And so it was that Carlos and Gloria were sitting cross-legged on the beach at sunset, a blanket wrapped cozily around their shoulders. He had her hand clasped tenderly in both of his; he gazed deeply into her startling, gold-flecked blue eyes. “What
this entails is not a normal relationship,” he told her. “I want to take you with me but it won’t be as a normal man, because I am not a normal man any longer. I want to take care of you. I want you to be my wife. I’ve always
known that. Don Juan
has told me that. He’s seen you; you’ve hovered around me in dreams. He has
identified you as the woman who is going to be in the center of the hurricane with me. There are other winds in the north, south, east and west, and they are
very cold and
ruthless women, but you are not that way. I want to take care of you. I will do
everything in my power for you, because this is a commitment, one that has existed for a very long time. One that will exist beyond this lifetime.”

[Carlos played that same game over and over and over with many women.]

With that Carlos leaned over and kissed Gloria. It was an intense, directed sort of kiss; not passionate, not sloppy, not out of control, just very directed, she can’t describe it any other way. At that moment, the sounds of the beach grew silent. Time
stood still. She felt herself giving something away to him, something very deep, something of herself she’d never reclaim.

[To be continued...]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)